Paterson Elementary School

W. B. Paterson, Educational Provider

William Burns Paterson is known for being an educational provider, a prominent horticulturist, and one of the founders of Alabama State University. Born in Scotland on February 9, 1850, Paterson immigrated to America in 1867, soon after the end of the Civil War.

Tullibody Academy

He came to Alabama in 1870, looking for work, when he befriended the McFaddens, who had a problem of keeping Black workers on the plantation during Reconstruction days. Paterson established a school on or near the McFadden plantation in a brush arbor before relocating to four miles outside of Greensboro. At its inception, the school had only five or six students “under the oaks, with logs for benches.” Utilizing his skills as a builder, Paterson constructed his own schoolhouse, “a frame structure 65 x 45.“He named the institution Tullibody Academy after his Scottish home village and led it until his move to Marion in 1878.

When Paterson established Greensboro’s first school for African Americans, he was immediately met with local resistance. Many white residents fiercely opposed Black education, particularly if it required their financial support, often declaring, “Let the Negroes educate themselves.” Paterson faced a “long and hard struggle” to secure funding, but he found crucial allies in his friends, the McFaddens, alongside other local plantation owners and civic leaders who did everything they could to help. Through their backing and his own relentless efforts, Paterson gradually “won the respect and admiration and aid of the best people of that portion of the South.” While a small circle of Greensboro’s affluent white citizens supported the venture, the broader community remained largely indifferent or outright hostile.

In 1879, Paterson stepped into the role of president at the Lincoln Normal University for Colored Students, a position he held for many years. Following a devastating fire that destroyed much of the campus, Paterson worked tirelessly in 1887 to secure the legislative authorization and funding needed to relocate the institution. Later that same year, the school moved to Montgomery, where Paterson reopened it within the Beulah Baptist Church as the State Normal School for Colored Students. He continued to lead the institution until his death from heart failure on March 16, 1915. The school underwent several name changes over the subsequent decades until 1969, when the State Board of Education officially designated it as Alabama State University.

With a keen interest in horticulture, Paterson established Rosemont Gardens in 1892 at 116 Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery, which was advised by his friends to go into the cultivation of flowers on a commercial scale. Rosemont Gardens still operates to this day, offering a curated collection of giftable house plants and home decor.

W. B. Paterson Elementary School

Bearing his name, W. B. Paterson Elementary School was first constructed in 1953 at a cost of precisely $227,527.63, consisting of twelve classrooms, a multi-purpose room with a stage and kitchen, offices, a medical clinic, and a teacher’s lounge. The building was expanded throughout the years, with daily attendance peaking in the early 1960s with over 760 students, some of whom were children of military and civilian personnel stationed at the nearby Maxwell Air Force Base, Gunter Air Force Base, and Veterans’ Administration Hospital.

Like many Alabama schools of its era, Paterson Elementary was strictly segregated, serving an exclusively African American student body. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Alabama legislature resisted integration by passing a 1956 constitutional amendment that stripped away the state’s obligation to guarantee a public education. This maneuver allowed schools to abruptly shut down if forced to integrate, while simultaneously channeling support toward a rising wave of segregated private academies.

True desegregation in Alabama’s school system was stalled for over a decade, finally gaining traction in the late 1960s through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a pivotal 1967 ruling by U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., which struck down the state’s deceptive “pupil placement law.”

Decline, Closure, and Demolition

Paterson Elementary School closed down in 2009 following a vote by the Montgomery County Board of Education. Two other schools in the county, Hayneville Road and Pintlala Elementary Schools, were closed along with it in an effort to save $3 million for a school system facing a $13 million revenue shortfall. At the time of its closing, Paterson Elementary served 153 students from K-5th grade with a student-to-teacher ratio of 10:1, one of the lowest in the state. The school reopened for a short time as Paterson Academy Creative Education, a magnet school serving grades 6-12, but that too was shuttered. In June 2026, the long-abandoned building was demolished to make way for a healthcare facility for city employees.

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